An aesthetic of trust

Trust in the inherent talent in people and trust in the power of writing as a process.

The three realms of writing

the nature of writ- ing, of art, and of personal experience

AWA’s five essential affirmations

Everyone has a strong, unique voice.
Everyone is born with creative genius.
Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level.
The teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem.
A writer is someone who writes.

AWA’s five essential practices

A nonhierarchical spirit (how we treat writing) in the workshop is maintained while at the same time an appropriate discipline (how we interact as a group) keeps writers safe.
Confidentiality about what is written in the workshop is maintained, and the privacy of the writer is protected. All writing is treated as fiction unless the writer requests that it be treated as autobiography. At all times writers are free to refrain from reading their work aloud.
Absolutely no criticism, suggestion, or question is directed toward the writer in response to first-draft, just-written work. A thorough critique is offered only when the writer asks for it and distributes work in manuscript form. Critique is balanced; there is as much affirmation as suggestion for change.
The teaching of craft is taken seriously and is conducted through exercises that invite experimentation and growth as well as through response to manuscripts and in private conferences.
The leader writes along with the participants and reads that work aloud at least once in each writing session. This practice is absolutely necessary, for only in this way is there equality of risk-taking and mutuality of trust.

Focus of a writing practice

Writing, taking the writer seriously as an artist, and insisting on the bottom line—good work.

Working on writing is more than just trying to judge quality

Writers have an essential need for privacy to do their best work

Writers have an essential need for audience and colleagues

Writing is about freedom to go wherever you need to go

A writing group is not a therapy group—it is concerned with liberating the artist in the person.

Writing is always political

“the issue is not whether our writing will be political. If we are silent, our silence is political. If we write, our writing is political.”

“the privilege of voice carries with it a responsibility to speak for social justice”

The depths of your consciousness is the source of your most powerful words

the main theme or force of the book: going deep.

learning to take the risk of going to the most powerful insights, memories, perceptions, and feelings that one has (or rather, that one mostly doesn’t yet quite have)—as a source of one’s most powerful words.

Writing groups require wisdom and firm leadership

There are crucial guidelines and rules of thumb that at least one person needs to take responsibility for. Otherwise people are likely to take ad- vantage of each other, give feedback that’s not helpful, and abuse each other’s privacy.

any dedicated person can lead a writers’ group—as long as they are vigilant about enforcing these guidelines of respect.

Writing group vs. workshop

She distinguishes the role of a writing group leader from the role of a workshop leader. A writing group leader is vigilant to keep the group safe for the writing process. A workshop leader does that but also offers trained guidance in writing, editing, and seeking publication.

Aspire to center in your voice and experience

I deliberately did not reread Peter’s books (except to dip in here or there occasionally), needing to stay centered in my own voice and experience.

Using the book for writers who write alone

If you are a writer working alone (and every member of a workshop or a class is also a writer who writes alone), I suggest that you first read Part I, “The Writer Alone,” following the exercise suggestions if they interest you, and then go to Part III, “Additional Exercises.”

Using the book for workshop or group leaders or teachers

If you are a workshop or group leader, a teacher, or someone who would like to gather other writers to write together, read Part I for the benefit of your own writing and to acquaint yourself with this method. Then read Part II, “Writing with Others.”

Part III will give you resources for leading varied exercises.

Using the book to help disempowered people

If you are a person who wants to use writing to empower people whose voices have been silenced by poverty, illness, incarceration, or other hard- ship, I hope you will read the entire book. First tend to the writer in your- self by writing in response to the exercises that beckon to you in Part I, then read Part II about the workshop method as it is used with writers who have a standard formal education and (usually) can pay a fee for the group experience.

creating a different sort of writing community—one that is specifically designed to work for healing the broken world.

Everyone is a writer

Everyone is a writer. You are a writer.

Those who do not write stories and poems on solid surfaces tell them, sing them, and, in so doing, write them on the air. Creating with words is our continuing pas- sion. We dream stories; we make up stories, poems, songs, and tell them to ourselves. All alone, we write.

It may not be committed to paper, but the artist, the writer, is at work.

Art is not just the province of the privileged. Art belongs to the people.

Even if you don’t talk easily to others, but spin out stories in your own head—if you talk to yourself—you can write. You are already an artist; all you have to do is take up your pen and begin.

What I believe is not believed by everyone, and it is not practiced by everyone who believes it! It is this: There is no place for hierarchies in the heart, and the making of art is a matter of the heart. Art is the creative expression of the human spirit, and it cannot—it must not, for the sake of the human community—be limited to those few who achieve critical acclaim or financial reward.

John Gardner wrote, “Genius is as common as old shoes. Everybody has it.”

Genius is hidden everywhere; it is in every person, waiting to be evoked, enabled, supported, celebrated. It is in you. It is in me. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s vision. Dickinson wrote Dickinson’s. Who will write yours, if you do not?

there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us… . If you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original. (Dorothea Brande)

Art is essential to all of us because every human being is born a creator

All people are writers who can, if they so desire, claim their writing as a personal (and perhaps public) art form.

I cannot teach anyone to be an artist, but then I don’t have to because everyone is already an artist. Real teachers everywhere know this.

You are a writer. You are an artist. Accept it, celebrate it, and practice it for the rest of your life.

Writing connects us

We also write with others.

We are all connected to one another and to the mystery at the heart of the universe through our strange and marvelous ability to create words. When we write, we create, and when we offer our creation to one another, we close the wound of loneliness and may participate in healing the broken world. Our words, our truth, our imagining, our dreaming, may be the best gifts we have to give.

To write deeply one needs a safe environment

You can write as deeply as you think—but only if you are safe enough, if you can forget yourself enough. If you can “let go” and tell the truth of what you have experienced or imagined, you can write.

But what is that recognizable genius made of? Safety, self-confidence, focus, and practice. These factors enable one to reach further, go deeper, and take greater risks than is possible for a person trapped in fear and self-protection.

Genius often emerges where there is intimate support for it.

Neither of them was seen by their contemporaries as being greatly gifted. It seems truly important that there be a community of support around the artist that protects the making of the art.

Where there is no intimate support, there is often the driving force of suffering, creating an intense personal isolation, a kind of solitude, out of which the voice of genius arises. Each of us has genius, but we need support, and we can give it to one another as friends or in honest and supportive workshop settings.

As artists in supportive community with one another, we share our wisdom and our experience and help each other complete the solitary journey to find treasure.

Writer’s block is a learned disability

Not being able to write is a learned disability. It is almost always the result of scar tissue, of disbelief in yourself accumulated as a result of unhelpful responses to your writing. Those wounds can be healed, those blocks can be removed.

Not to be able to write is a learned disability, taught to us in school and at home, imprinted on us in letters: “F,” “D,” “C-minus.”

Commercial success in writing is not always driven by art

Being commercially successful is a very good thing: We all like to eat! But a commercially successful writer may or may not be working as an artist. That is, sometimes one can make a lot of money repeating oneself, or writing for reasons other than those of making art. Rarely is an artist rewarded with fame and fortune, but commercial success is often a matter of entrepreneurship, luck, and a craft appropriate to the marketplace.

Craft vs. Art

Craft is essential; I will work all my life at my craft. But craft is not the same thing as art. Craft is the knowledge of how to mix blue with yellow on my palette, but art is the courage to dip the brush into the paint and lay it on the canvas in my own way. Craft is knowing when to revise a manuscript and when to leave it alone, but art is the fire in the mind that put the story on the page in the first place. To grow in craft is to increase the breadth of what I can do,

Art is the courage to be yourself

but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone, to communicate what I and only I can communicate: that which I have experienced or imagined.

I hear fear and hope and longing. I do not hear any garbage. I hear passion. I hear desire. And when they begin speaking in the mother tongue of their own voices, mining the mother lode of their own stories, the material they and they alone know “by heart,” I hear art.

Whether your purpose is artistic expression, communication with friends and family, the healing of the inner life, or achieving public recognition for your art—the foun- dation is the same: the claiming of yourself as an artist/writer and the strengthening of your writing voice through practice, study, and helpful (as opposed to damaging) communication with others.

Empower the voice of those who’ve been denied a voice

Those whose language skills are impaired nevertheless have a story, and if it can be told in the unique and idiosyncratic form of the author’s own way with words, it can be brilliant. If we valued the voices of those who have been denied a voice, we would have a canon of literature so much more diverse, interesting, and humane than the canon we do have.

Some critics claim that all truly great works of literature are already recognized. What a cynical and small-minded view of the human spirit!

I have never heard a word of garbage in any workshop of mine!

Writing is therapy

Many famous writers have acknowledged that the line between writing as an artistic act and as an act of personal healing is a thin line indeed.

Writing as therapy and writing as an artistic act may be the same act. Whether or not writing heals the writer is irrelevant. What matters is the power of the work itself.

Not publishing one’s works is okay

But I am also pleased with many that will never be read except by the writer’s friends. Those works will never be offered to the public because the writer is too shy; too uncertain of her or his own abilities; too awkward at making contacts; too busy to send off manuscripts; too bruised by academic grading systems and hos- tile teacher responses to endure “rejections”; or too poor to pay the endless postage, copying costs, and telephone bills that are the start-up costs of writing as an entrepreneurial business. The fact that excellent work is unpublished does not diminish its artistry. The list of writers who, like Emily Dickinson, were undiscovered and unappreciated until long after they died is long. It isn’t difficult to imagine all those whose papers were lost forever by relatives who were not as careful or as diligent as Emily’s sister, Vinnie.

Some art works are meant for an intimate audience

In other times and other cultures, art was made for the family: quilts, hand-carved pieces, lullabies, ballads. The audience for that art was intimate. In a good writing workshop, some exquisite work is given to and received by an intimate audience.

The value of art is not monopolized by the commercial world or the academy

Writing is making art, and the test of its value cannot be given into the hands of either the commercial world or the academy.

Writing is only facilitated, not taught

Those of us who teach—really teach—know that we are simply midwives to that which is already within our students. Our task is only this: to pre- pare a place, to welcome, to receive, and to encourage. Our task is the midwife’s task: We help prepare the newborn for presentation. With a newborn text, as with a newborn baby, this may mean some cleaning, some dressing up (that’s craft). But the life, the spirit of the newborn, is already there (that’s art).

“Teaching” is mostly showing what has been done before, not so that it should be copied, but so that options are known, that derivative work is recognized, and that all that has preceded us is available as foundation or as reference point. Sometimes, if I am careful, I can help an artist recog- nize her or his own unique voice and come to trust it. But each of us has to claim this alone: I am an artist. I am a writer.

A writer is someone who writes

“A writer is someone who writes,” wrote William Stafford.

Your tasks as a writer or artist

Give your art/writing time.
Sound more and more like yourself.
Experiment, play, take risks, be brave.
Believe in the freshness, vitality, and importance of your own experience and imagination.
Practice in ways that will teach you to recognize your own voice and to increase its range
Believe in yourself as an artist-in-training, and protect yourself from everyone and everything that undermines that belief.
Observe.
Remember.
Imagine.
Find and keep in contact with other writer/artists who can provide you with an intimate community of support, give you honest critical response, strengthen you, and encourage your work.

Writing is talking

Well, if you won’t write about it, at least talk it to me.

Fear is attached to writing

however it may be disguised, fear is close to the center of the first stories we will want to tell.

as we try to tell our tales, fear will rise. At times, fear keeps us from writing at all, or keeps us from writing as truly, clearly, and brilliantly as we might. Fear has good reason for being; understanding it can make all the difference.

A writer’s greatest fear is to discover the truth about themself

The first and greatest fear that blocks us as writers is fear of the truth we may discover.

the unconscious part of us knows more than the conscious mind will admit.

Writing, like dreaming, sometimes tells us what we are not ready to hear. What if we suddenly saw our lives, our experiences, from a different point of view? What if we glimpsed the face behind the mask

What if we really saw the one we may have forgotten, the one we may have lost, or the one who made us afraid?

the sense of another’s skill can make us timid, but nightmares rise from the depths.

Perhaps a world will be lost. And what will be there to take its place? What price, truth?

Everyone has to answer that question for him- or herself.

I have seen both men and women write “fiction” only to discover facts from childhood that altered their understanding of themselves. For some the choice has been to stop writing, not to pursue expression that would surely take them beyond the known perimeters of the inner world. I respect those who make that choice. Thomas Aquinas, after finishing his massive Summa, is purported to have said, “There are some things that simply cannot be uttered.” And spent the rest of his life in silence and prayer.

Fear points to buried treasure in writing

fear is a friend of the writer. Where there is fear, there is buried treasure. Something important lies hidden—something that matters

The wild thing that frightens us so when it is hidden, guarded in our unconscious, becomes our spirit familiar when it is named—still full of power, still magical, but power released for us, not power caged and threatening.

If you think you don’t know, if you think you don’t want to write about it—look again. You are probably in the vicinity of “gold.”

A writing life necessitates that one goes deeper into one’s unconscious

There is danger in going down into the unknown. What we will find there, in the unconscious where creation happens, may call for all our skill, all our intuition. It may change us; it may redefine our lives. But I believe we have no other choice if we are to be artist/writers.

Even those truths that are painful will ultimately increase my wisdom, undergird my strength, make possible my art

Until that moment, almost half a century later, I could not look at the gold in the deepest room of my childhood. Now I am writing about it.

What you see, write it in a book. We cannot write what we do not see—not if we are artists. We must see. The great dogs that guard our secrets are not our enemies. They will let us go past them when we are ready. It is up to us to prepare our “magic apron.”

Abandonment is necessary in writing

Abandonment is a necessary task of the writer. As we grow in our art, our art changes, and we must move on.

the writer’s job is to abandon his or her work, to allow others to make judgment of its worth, and to go on to the next poem, the next story. All of us have habits of thought. Often for writers they include formulas of disbelief in our own gifts. If we cannot let go of the familiar old habits, we will not grow as artists. To grow as a writer, we must open our hearts, grow in our capacity to learn, and deepen our courage.

Childhood is the purest and deepest reservoir of a writer

The purest and deepest reservoir of material for the writer is his or her own childhood. Most beginning writers go instinctively to childhood images. This is not accidental, nor is it self-indulgent. It’s a good instinct, an artistic wisdom.

“Childhood is the writer’s only capital.”

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

Childhood images are already polished; the unconscious has already done much of the work of the artist—eliminating what is not important, keep- ing what is important, transforming it into myth.

The unconscious mind helps the writer

If you were to try to write out of what has just happened to you, to try to decide what is important about this day you have just lived, it would be very difficult. The unconscious mind, however, holds for us images that have emotional importance. Even the most random memory is retained as a kind of code for emotional information.

Every little snapshot memory in the mind is a code, a clue, an “open sesame” into important emotional information.

Use specific questions to uncover childhood memories

Many writers have spoken with me privately about the feeling that they cannot remember childhood. But if I ask specific, concrete questions— “Where was the table in the kitchen where you ate as a child? Where was the window in your bedroom?”—pictures come to the mind of the writer who “cannot remember.” A picture is an image, and a longtime remembered image is like a riddle. What astonishes me is how often, if we work carefully and patiently, the slightest childhood image will give up its secret.

When writing childhood memories, allow yourself to invent

It does not matter whether we invent as we go. We do, of course. But that doesn’t matter, because imagining is another way to get to the truth. The scene that we imagine is also metaphor, given to us by the unconscious memory bank in our minds. Metaphor, too, will lead us.

Write clearly and truthfully for your readers

“Caress the divine details.” Miraculously, if we write clearly and truthfully, our readers will also see the concrete images that we see in our minds and will participate by responding with their own emotional experience of the worlds we create.

After success, never kill the source and community that made your art possible

a time comes when we must take what we have learned, but go on without our parents, our teach- ers, our mentors, those who first showed us the way. We must go beyond at least some of our companions. And that necessary individuation—that breaking free—is sometimes very hard, sometimes even psychologically violent.

Taken as a metaphor for the inner life, seeing both the soldier and the old woman as parts of one psyche, perhaps it has to do with our tendency, once we have succeeded, to kill off the very part of ourselves that was the source of our art.

If every one of us, when we begin to succeed, could continue to honor that in ourselves that is the source of our wisdom and our strength, no matter what it looks like or sounds like, there would not be such fear, such blocks to creativity.

Successful artists should help others succeed

And if everyone who succeeded as an artist then turned in humility and grace to help others succeed, there would be more art, and greater art, in the world.

Once you have your own magic apron and know where to find your gold, perhaps you can help someone else go past the great dogs that guard their treasure.

Writing about my story brings forth fears about other people in my story

There are very few stories of my own that are not also stories from the life of someone else. And my version of our story will always be my fiction, my interpretation. What right have I to impose my interpretation on the experience of someone else? What right have I to make fiction of some- one else’s life?

If I tell the exact truth as I see it, there are two dangers: First, the other will know what I really think—perhaps more than I want him or her to know—and second, what is true for me will probably be untrue for the other. It may not be just a difference of interpretation, either; what I hold as truth may in fact not be true at all. Most likely, everything I remember has been altered by the artist in me: my imagination.

One fear is of hurting someone else, decreasing or destroying someone else’s privacy. Another fear is of loss. I may lose the other’s confidence, respect, even love. I may lose the other.

The fear may also be of a lawsuit for libel. Fear of loss of all economic security. Fear of loss of reputation. It may even be fear of loss of life.

To write, let go of fear

To try to write with fear operating is to try to swim with your hands tied behind your back. You won’t get very far, and you may very well drown in the attempt.

When we write free from fear, we tend to write what matters most.

How to deal with fear as a writer

The first step in becoming free of fear is to accept yourself as a writer. All writers deal with this problem. You are not alone. None of us creates ex nihilo (out of nothing). All writing involves self-revelation. Even if the actual facts of our lives are not revealed, we cannot escape the fact that writing reveals the ways our minds work. All writing is, at least, an auto- biography of the imagination.

Second, understand that all our memories are already fictions.

Third, write it first; fix it later.

Write it first; fix it later

Remember that your first draft—which is absolutely essential—is private. You can write anything that comes and “fix it” later. Once you have the free flow of a full first draft on the page, you can do the necessary editing to protect others, to protect yourself. But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear, by “ought” and “should” and the internalized voices of those whose lives intersect your own.

For first-draft writing, claim everything as your own. Everything that has entered the pupil of your eye, every sound that has entered the inner chamber of your ear, every texture you have touched, every taste, every smell is yours to rearrange, to recreate. Allow everything your family and friends have given you to be your own; let it flow onto the page. Write in total freedom; let there be no impediment between “the dreaming place” (the unconscious) and the conscious mind. Feel free to use real names if they are what come to mind—real places and details of action, scene, and speech. Make no judgments, no omissions, no corrections. Remember, this is just a first draft. You need the freedom in order to catch the passion and the music and the mystery of the writing. You will fix it later.

If we allow ourselves a fully free first draft, we will create power- ful writing out of the stuff of memory and, as we revise, protect the innocent (and the guilty).

You are the landlord of your own soul. Let the words, the memories, the imaginings pour white-hot onto the page. You can decide later what they are, what they might become, and when it is time to show them to someone else.

Edit first draft after at least two days

Don’t “fix it” immediately. Dorothea Brande wisely cautions writers to put first drafts away for at least two days before making any decisions about change.

“Your judgment on it until you have slept is worth exactly nothing… . You are simply not ready to read your story objectively when it is newly finished; and there are writers who cannot trust their objectivity toward their own work for at least a month.”

Fiction is just another way to tell the truth

By being forced to abandon the limits of fact, I allowed into my writing the unconscious metaphor making that is everyone’s deepest genius.

Fiction is just another way to tell the truth.

Write what readers won’t forget

“Tell me … something I can’t forget.”

How do we know what readers won’t forget? Most likely, your reader won’t forget what you yourself can’t forget—what is burned most deeply into your own mind.

To write, empty your head of critical people

She replied gently, “It sounds to me like there are a lot of absentee landlords of your soul.”

This is crucial: If you are to write, you must move out of “rented rooms” in your mind, rooms that you have allowed to belong to someone else. It will (usually) not happen overnight. But you can begin at any time to be free. You must own yourself, have no “absentee landlords.”

This does not mean you run roughshod over other people’s feelings or other people’s privacy. There are ways to protect others and still be free

Revise the first draft to strengthen your integrity to your personal truth

When you come back to it, decide: Shall I disguise? Shall I omit? Shall I add fictional complications? Shall I wait to publish this

Shall I use a pseudonym instead of my own name? I have changed names, places, descriptions, even changed the gender of a character, in order to disguise the source of what I was describing. You can do any- thing except burn it.

It is more important to ask: Have I gone all the way? Have I told all of the truth that my inner eye sees? The work of revision should be asking whether or not I have told the truth—what my heart, my deepest self, knows. Have I traced the shadow along the side of the bright things my eye first saw? Have I taken the time to see what is half-hidden in the shadows at the far edge of my vision? Have I allowed my unconscious to give me metaphors, to surprise me? Have I told the truth that may be the opposite of the usual path my mind takes, thinking its habitual thoughts?

See creative writing as self-revelation

creative writing is treated as self-revelation and profoundly respected.

Writing in school is often painful

But for many people, writing in school was painful

She does not mean you any harm. She herself was injured when she tried to write. She herself has suffered being silenced by judgment. She does not know that she is passing on the damage that was done to her long before this day.

The bad news is: At an early age the writer goes into hiding. Almost every time the writer in you dared to move, it got smacked down again with a “grade,” a “comment,” or a “criticism.”

The writer may hide but it never dies

The good news is this: Even though the writer goes into hiding, the writer doesn’t die! Every day the hidden writer practiced; every time you came home from a hard day at school or work and said to someone in your family, “You know what happened to me today?” and told the story— the writer in you was practicing using suspense, character, dialogue, metaphor, simile, plot, denouement. All your life, you have been writing on the air, and that has built craft and confidence and voice. It is all there, ready and waiting for you.

You need support of a community to combat fear of success

Fear of success is frequently a problem for women who have been raised to be good girls, obedient, keeping to their place. It is a problem for men and women who are struggling to overcome the effects of stereotype and abuse, or get out of poverty, or out of racially or culturally defined limitations

The fear of success, perhaps as much as the fear of failure, may block our art. The successful writer, no less than the beginner, needs the consolation and support of a community of writing friends.

To write deeply, treat writing as a walk

There is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a soldier who is going through a forest.

The act of writing is a tremendous adventure into the unknown, always fraught with danger. But the deeper you go and the longer you work at your art, the greater will be your treasure. You have a magic “apron.” It is woven of your imagination and your voice. If you trust your imagination to bring your own images up from the depths and trust your own voice to articulate those images, you will go without harm through the room where you gather copper. The silver you find in the second room will be of far greater worth than copper, and the gold you find in the last and deepest room will make you glad to abandon silver.

After a long time of trying, and of meeting walls of inner silence, there can come about a self-perpetuating pattern. Fear breeds fear, increases, and can become the source as well as the product of itself.

There is a simple solution. Never, never, never say to yourself, I am going to write a poem. Never say, I am going to write a story. Or a play. Or a novel, for godssake.

Without knowing anything at all about what it is going to be, just lift your pen and write a single, specific, concrete image. See it in your mind, and as fast as you can, write it down. Describe it in extreme detail. The more specific and intimate, the better.

Get in close, describe a detail, and don’t allow yourself to predict where it is going. Write one detail after another. Skip around. Abandon one thing when another appears in your mind.

Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town talks about how one image triggers another. Most of his poems, he says, begin with a town. For him, it must be a town of a particular size—not too big, not too small. After the image of the town, he jumps to something else, and when the poem is done he often goes back and removes the town.

The disconnections are as important as the connections. One image triggers another and, like a person walking on large rocks across a creek where the water is fast and slippery, we will not get to the fifth rock that allows us to step onto the opposite bank unless we first step on, and then abandon, rocks one, two, three, and four.

So with writing. The first image that comes may not be the treasure I am after.

Your best, your deepest writing, often will not come to you first. You have to follow a kind of trail, allow images to come and go, sketch as visual artists sketch, until you get to what Tess Gallagher called “something I can’t forget”—something that holds you (and will hold your reader), something that will not let you go. But don’t be asking yourself about this as you write. Just play, sketch, skip from one thing to another until, without your even noticing it, you are “seeing Grandma”—you forget that you are writing, and the pen keeps on moving. That’s where you want to be, in that dream- ing place where the unconscious is engaged and writing is without effort. Trust me—trust yourself! That will be your best writing.

“Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Making art with our words often begins with emotion remembered. Then another kind of creation takes over as remembered images are changed, imagined in the solitary act of writing.

Once you have begun to trust this way of writing—this magical “open sesame” of beginning with the intimate detail and trusting changes and disconnections—it will become perfectly clear how impossible, how absurd it is to ask a roomful of people, “All right, class, now write a story.” Or to say to a friend, “There’s a sunset. Write a poem.” If the sunset is right there, why should the friend write a sunset? Writing doesn’t come like that. It comes up from memory or imagination, and it skips like a flat stone across the water until finally it sinks into the depths where wonderful monsters and beautiful creatures dwell.

Insights

Treat your writing practice like your free religions (perhaps everything!): begin somewhere but let yourself change and get to places until you reach something where you can settle down. Now that I think about it, this is exactly how to design a life: try different things, let yourself be guided by your curiosity, and then commit when needed.

Form is the shape of content

I will not need to ask whether the form should be story or poem or novel or play. Painter Ben Shahn has written a book titled The Shape of Content. In it he says, “Form is the shape of content.” Those six words are among the most important I have ever learned about making art. If you are true to the content, the form will take care of itself.

Exercises

Beginning at Your Own Beginning: Kisses
Healing the Wounds of Bad Experiences: NSPC
Getting Rid of Internal Critics: The Bus
Beginning (Again): Palaui
well
Clustering and Mapping: see Diary dated 2024-02-04

Topics to check

Writing process movement
William Stafford

Resources to check

Brande, D. Becoming a writer.
Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. Oxford University Press.
Hugo, R. The triggering town.
Shahn, B. The shape of content.

References

Schneider, P. (2003). Writing Alone and with Others. Oxford University Press.

Vince Imbat

Writing Alone and with Others by Pat Schneider